Double-Resonance SAW Filters.

A novel surface acoustic wave filter on a leaky-wave substrate is studied. It features a hiccup-type resonance occurring around a distributed gap between two long interdigital transducers. Compared to a classical coupled resonator filter, it enables a relatively narrow pass-band (1% to 2% of center frequency) with low insertion loss, steep skirts, and improved suppression levels. The structure consists of long transducers having the number of fingers greater than 1/K² and 1/κ, where K² is the coupling coefficient of the substrate material and κ is the reflectivity per wavelength, separated with short transducer sections constituting a distributed gap. A strong, localized resonance is formed in the gap region, in addition to the resonance arising in the long structures-hence, the name double-resonance filter. The substrate studied here is 42°-rotated lithium tantalite. We show experimental results for both single-ended and unbalanced-to-balanced filters at 1.6 GHz, having a minimum insertion loss of 1.07 dB, suppressions of 30 dB, and absolute -3-dB bandwidth of 29 MHz (1.9% of the center frequency). For the balanced device, the amplitude imbalance over the passband ranges from -0.6 dB to 2 dB and the phase imbalance from 1° to 4.5°. Furthermore, we have measured the acoustical power distributions using a scanning laser interferometer, and we compare these results with the profiles simulated using a coupling-of-modes model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]